A home for Summer Solstice: Five-year lease of city building provides space to prepare floats and costumes

Members of the Santa Barbara Arts Collective, the Summer Solstice Celebration and dignitaries, including Santa Barbara Mayor Helene Schneider, attend Friday's ribbon-cutting for the new home of the Solstice Parade.STEVE MALONE/NEWS-PRESS PHOTOS
Members of the Santa Barbara Arts Collective, the Summer Solstice Celebration and dignitaries, including Santa Barbara Mayor Helene Schneider, attend Friday’s ribbon-cutting for the new home of the Solstice Parade.

STEVE MALONE/NEWS-PRESS PHOTOS

Wearing hard hats and holding shovels that were more metaphorical than practical, members of the City Council, the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission and the Summer Solstice broke ground Friday afternoon on a permanent home for the parade’s workshop.

The arts community also got a year-round work space in the bargain, a result of years of work by all involved.

With Friday’s ribbon-cutting, Summer Solstice returns to the complex at the corner of Ortega and Garden streets that it used from 2005 to 2011 on a year-to-year lease.

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